In their strange cosmogony predating Copernicus by two millennia, the ancient Greek scientific sect of the Pythagoreans placed at the center of the universe a ball of fire. It was not hell but the heart of creation. Hell, Milton told us centuries and civilizations later, is something else, somewhere else: “The mind is its own place,” he wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.

That is what the non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson celebrates in her shamanic poem “Center of the Universe,” found in her extraordinary collection The Kissing of Kissing (public library), song of the mind electric, great bellowing yes to life.

CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
by Hannah Emerson

Please try to go
to hell frequently
because you will
find the light there

yes yes — please
try to kiss the ideas
that you find there
yes yes — please

try to get that
it is the center
of the universe
yes yes — please

try to help yourself
by kissing the hot hot
hot life that is born
there yes yes — please

try to yell in hell
yes yes — please
try to free yourself
by pouring yourself

into the gutter all
guttural guttural yell
yes yes yes — please
try to get that you

become the being
that you came there
to be yes yes — please
try to go to the great

great great fire that you
created because you
become the light
that the fire makes

inside of you
yes yes — please
try to kiss yourself
for going there

yes yes — please
get that you are
reborn there
yes yes — please

begin your day

Drink in more soul-slaking poetry here, then revisit the story of how Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, found himself “regenerated into a new form… reborn for the better.”

A great tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which people would rather feel right than understand — the situation, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the basic fact of the other.

Growling beneath it all is an aversion to our own imperfections — we would rather look away and toward the faults of others than fully step into our own shadow and embrace it with light. In so segregating our own nature, we abdicate our wholeness and cease being fully human.

How to rehumanize ourselves by owning our shadow is what Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) examines in some wonderful passages from Tao: The Watercourse Way (public library) — his final book, which he never fully finished before death took him one late-autumn day; it was posthumously published with the help of his friend Al Chung-liang Huang.

Alan Watts, early 1970s. (Photograph courtesy of Everett Collection)

Watts writes:

At the head of all virtues Confucius put not righteousness (i), but human-heartedness (jen), which is not so much benevolence, as often translated, but being fully and honestly human.

[…]

A true human is not a model of righteousness, a prig or a prude, but recognizes that some failings are as necessary to genuine human nature as salt to stew.

A generation before Parker Palmer urged in his magnificent commencement address that you “take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself” so that “the shadow’s power is put in service of the good,” Watts adds:

Merely righteous people are impossible to live with because they have no humor, do not allow the true human nature to be, and are dangerously unconscious of their own shadows. Like all legalists and busybodies, they are trying to put the world on a Procrustean bed of linear regulations so that they are unable to make reasonable compromises.

[…]

Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.

Art by Andrea Dezsö from a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

(It is worth nothing that Tao: The Watercourse Way was itself a way of admitting, and remedying, a human weakness on the scale of society — a decade before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed the universal pronoun, Watts becomes the first to propose, in a footnote, that the Confucian word jen, which is ungendered in Chinese but has traditionally been translated into English as “man-heartedness,” instead be translated as “human-heartedness” and that all instances of “man” as the universal pronoun be replaced with “human.”)

Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality and the psychologist turned pioneering artist Anne Truitt on the cure for our chronic self-righteousness, then revisit Watts on love and the only real antidote to fear, happiness and how to live with presence, the art of learning not to think in terms of gain or loss, and the salve for our existential loneliness.

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays.

In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran wrote in the same era: “Nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.”

That search comes ablaze with uncommon tenderness in I Touched the Sun (public library) by musician and graphic novelist Leah Hayes — the story of a young boy’s quest to find and bear his own light.

One morning, warmed by the light of dawn, the boy awakes overcome by the desire to touch the sun.

His mother tells him it’s impossible — the sun is far too far. His father tells him it’s impossible — the sun is too hot to touch. His older brother, sipping soda by his bike, meets the quest with indifference.

And so the boy decides to go by himself.

He closes his eyes and launches into the sky. When he lands on the sun, he bends down to greet her and she embraces him hello with her great yellow arms.

We see the boy peeking from the sky onto a beach scene as the sun shows him where she works.

We see him admiring a bright flower as she shows him “what she’s made.”

She showed me things that look her years to grow…

…and things that only lasted seconds.

Carrying the story is the quiet conversation between the black-and-white simplicity of Hayes’s pencil and the incandescent richness of her crayons, emanating the candor of a child’s drawing and the refined subtlety of an artist’s lens on the world — a world of contrasts in the act of being made on the page, like a young life still unwritten, yet to be colored in with living.

Before the boy leaves, he asks the sun one simple, immense question: Where does her light come from?

From inside, she tells him, touching his heart.

Suddenly, a bright inner sun comes ablaze within him — the light he always carried, “not too hot, but just right,” now found.

The sun inside began to shine outward. It made me feel brilliant with light, like I could wake up the world with just my touch.

So illuminated, the boy feels ready to return home and embraces the sun goodbye before flying back down to Earth, where he finds his mother mesmerized by the stunning sunset aglow outside.

She doesn’t seem to notice anything has changed in him. Nor does his father as he carries the sleepy child up the stairs.

But looking out his bedroom window into the night sky, the boy knows, the boy feels that the light is always and already there.

Couple I Touched the Sun with Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated meditation on life and our search for light — then savor Mary Ruefle’s magnificent poem “Kiss of the Sun.”

And if you are still searching for your own light, take rapturous assurance from Nina Simone:

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy